This is the joint website of Women Against Rape and Black Women's Rape Action Project. Both organisations are based on self-help and provide support, legal information and advocacy. We campaign for justice and protection for all women and girls, including asylum seekers, who have suffered sexual, domestic and/or racist violence.

WAR was founded in 1976. It has won changes in the law, such as making rape in marriage a crime, set legal precedents and achieved compensation for many women. BWRAP was founded in 1991. It focuses on getting justice for women of colour, bringing out the particular discrimination they face. It has prevented the deportation of many rape survivors. Both organisations are multiracial.

Janipher Maseko

She was 13 when she arrived in the UK. She was looking for a place of safety. This is what she found

The Guardian, Saturday 24 November 2007

I came to this country five years ago, a desperate young teenager, alone, in search of help and safety. The last thing I expected was that I would end up sleeping on the streets in one of the richest countries in the world, hungry, cold, tired and bleeding. If, by telling my story, I can prevent the same thing happening to just one other woman and her children, then it will be worth speaking out.

31 May 2007: On 29 May, following a wave of public outrage against the Home Office, social services and SERCO (the company running Yarl’s Wood Removal Centre), Ms Janipher Maseko, an 18 year old mother who was detained and separated from her two young children, was told that she and her children are to be released. Hundreds of letters, calls and other pressure forced the Home Office to concede that they could not justify her continued incarceration. Directions to remove her to Uganda have also been cancelled.

In the course of pressing for Ms Maseko to be reunited with her children and released, it came out that other mothers and babies had also been cruelly separated. In a letter to Lord Avebury about a Vietnamese mother and her six-month-old baby, Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne said:

Update: On 29 May, following a wave of public outrage against the Home Office, social services and SERCO Ms Janipher Maseko, was told that she and her children are to be released.

Ms Janipher Maseko, aged 18, who had fled rape and violence in Uganda and sought asylum in the UK four years ago as an unaccompanied minor, contacted BWRAP on 18 May from Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre through a fax written with the assistance of other detained women whom BWRAP is helping. Ms Maseko was terrified that she would be deported without her newborn son and one-year-old daughter from whom she had been separated for about 10 days.